Shoot first, evict later

In Georgia, tenants have a hard time standing up to laws that favor landlords

Manuel Abreo was at work the morning a DeKalb County marshal, accompanied by a leasing agent, came to Abreo’s Euclid Avenue apartment to evict him — and shot his dog.

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Tensions between Abreo and his landlord had been on the rise; he and other tenants at Maple Place claim to have lived for months in a state of disrepair.

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“There was mold growing in the carpet. All the walls were cracked. The plaster was coming down,” says Mike Jenkins, Abreo’s former roommate. “It was pretty bad.”

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Like his neighbors, Abreo says he had been urging Habersham Properties to fix the damage. Tenants claim they repeatedly called the maintenance office and left messages. No one would call back.

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Ashli McMahon, who lives upstairs, says nobody has answered her pleas to fix her stove, which she says leaks gas and won’t heat, or her porch, which is bowing and she fears is close to collapse.

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The company did send someone over in August. He cleared McMahon’s porch and others’ of chairs, tables, a grill and a dog kennel. McMahon and two other residents say they never saw the stuff again. “And the porch still has not been touched,” McMahon says.

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City records show there haven’t been an exorbitant number of complaints against Habersham, although three of the company’s 15 properties had enough to warrant special inspections.

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But the incidents at Maple Place point to shortcomings in Georgia’s tenant protection laws, which are ill-equipped to deal with showdowns between property owners and outraged renters.

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“On the whole, Georgia landlord-tenant law is not as balanced and doesn’t give the tenants as many rights as laws in many other states,” says Dennis Goldstein, an attorney for Atlanta Legal Aid who trains lawyers and judges on the subject. “The laws ... make it difficult for tenants who don’t know the landlord-tenant law or don’t have attorneys.”

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State law says a landlord must “keep the premises in repair” and holds him or her responsible for “damages arising from defective construction or for damages arising from the failure to keep the premises in repair.” But nothing in the statute states when a landlord must complete repairs — or how he must reimburse tenants who, unable to live under gross conditions, pay for repairs themselves.

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A tenant must look beyond the legal code to truly understand his or her rights, according to Goldstein.

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“You have three short statutes dealing with the duty to repair,” Goldstein says. “And then you have hundreds if not thousands of cases that refine what the statute says.”

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According to rulings in numerous cases, landlords must complete repairs within a “reasonable time” of learning about the problem, says Goldstein. But not all tenants have the time, the money and the attorney to enforce the law.

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“Let’s say, for instance, something really breaks or leaks and the landlord’s not paying for it,” says David Bass, who was president of the now-defunct Atlanta Tenants Rights Association. “If it costs you $500 to fix the roof that’s falling in on you, and it costs you $600 for the rent, you’re still out the $1,100. You may get the $500 back in a month, or however long it takes the landlord to drag his ass and for it to be heard in court and all that crap. But there’s still the inconvenience of having to pay everything up front.”

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Six years ago, the tenants association and state Sen. Donzella James, D-Atlanta, tried to strengthen Georgia’s tenant rights. Through the association, Bass logged 500 complaints from renters in eight months. He helped the senator write drafts of three bills, based on his analysis of tenant-landlord laws and ordinances in California, Chicago and New York. In those jurisdictions, it’s easier for tenants to insist upon repairs and harder for landlords to evict.

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“We’re pretty far behind,” Bass concluded. “A landlord can basically evict a tenant for any cause, at any time and can charge whatever he wants.”

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One of the bills James sponsored stated that a landlord must give a reason for evicting a tenant. “One would think that would be a very, very plainly existing law,” Bass says. “No, that does not exist.”

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The bills were a hot topic at the time, especially considering that one of them would have prevented landlords from jacking up rents prior to the 1996 Olympics.

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But all three bills died.

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After Bass lost political support, he continued in vain to amass a stack of tenants’ complaints. “I felt like it was time for me to bow out,” he says. “And that’s when the Atlanta Tenants Rights Association died. No one else picked it up.”

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Although the association no longer operates, tenants can air their grievances. One option is to file complaints with Atlanta Legal Aid (404-524-5811), which also has offices in Marietta, East Point and Decatur. The agency’s attorneys field calls, review tenants’ complaints and intervene with advice or court action.

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“My guess is we probably take [tenant complaints] in the thousands each year,” says attorney Goldstein. “We do a lot of cases ... where either we’ll help the person get the repairs or file a lawsuit to remedy the conditions or get compensation due to the failure to repair.”

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Atlanta ordinances are more accommodating to tenants than state law is, but not by much. The city mandates that a rental property be inspected just once every five years. But it also permits the city to inspect a property if five tenants file a complaint about a building, over any period of time, with the city’s housing inspection office (404-330-6190).

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There is no provision to fine landlords, but the city can require that a landlord complete all repairs. If the state of disrepair is severe, “the court is authorized to determine if the dwelling unit is unfit for human habitation,” the ordinance states.

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None of the Maple Place tenants CL interviewed had filed a complaint with the city, nor did they know that five complaints can force an inspection.

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The city’s housing inspection office, which fields about 300 tenant complaints per month, does not organize complaints by property owner. It does, however, track complaints according to address. Three complaints were lodged last year against Maple Place, and one resulted in a code violation. None were filed in 2001, after Habersham bought the property.

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Manuel Abreo says he didn’t know about Atlanta Legal Aid or his other recourses when Habersham’s maintenance office allegedly failed to answer his repair requests. He quit paying full rent, because he claims the apartment was filled with mildew due to a leak in the foundation.

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Habersham responded by sending an eviction notice. Abreo was scheduled to appear in court Oct. 12 to contest the eviction on grounds that he didn’t owe full rent because the landlord hadn’t performed the repairs.

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At about 8:30 a.m. Oct. 11, a DeKalb County marshal knocked on the door of apartment No. 1 at Maple Place. The marshal allegedly told tenant Jenkins, Abreo’s roommate, that he had an eviction order.

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The marshal asked if anyone else was home. Jenkins said no; Abreo was at work. Jenkins later claimed he didn’t know a friend of Abreo’s had spent the night.

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Jenkins says that as the woman walked from the bedroom into the living room, Abreo’s dog, a rottweiler named Stormy, followed her.

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The marshal didn’t say anything, according to Jenkins. The dog walked toward him. The dog was halfway between him and the girl. Jenkins says the dog didn’t bark and didn’t growl.

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The officer drew his gun and fired into the dog’s face, Jenkins says.

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“Her head hit the floor, kind of,” Jenkins says. “Then she picked herself back up and turned around. There was blood from floor to ceiling. It sprayed everywhere.”

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A neighbor, Suehyla El-Attar, ran into Abreo’s apartment. She says she saw the blood and started to cry.

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“I lost it,” El-Attar says. “Then I saw Stormy sitting in the corner, just staring at me. There was a hole through the bottom of her right eye, and blood was coming out.”

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She took the dog to a nearby vet, who said he didn’t have the facility to care for the bullet wound. So El-Attar drove Stormy to another vet who did the surgery.

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Abreo didn’t arrive at Maple Place until after El-Attar drove off with Stormy.

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“I was blood red,” Abreo says. “I knew I needed to get away from there. The dog means everything to me. That dog’s been with me her whole life. She depends on me. I depend on her.”

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Abreo returned to Maple Place hours later, to load his apartment’s former contents, which had been piled next to a Dumpster, into a moving truck.

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When Abreo went to court the next day, he claimed the eviction served Oct. 11 wasn’t lawfully carried out because he hadn’t yet been to court. But the judge told him there was nothing he could do, Abreo says. The eviction was upheld; the tenants hadn’t paid all their rent.

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There was no way to confirm with Habersham what happened with the eviction, the court hearing and the tenants’ inquiries for repairs. The woman at Habersham who answered a reporter’s phone call would not give the name of the agency’s manager or owner.

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“I can’t give you any information,” the woman repeated after numerous questions. “No one here can give you that information. I’m sorry.”

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Messages left with Habersham’s leasing agent for Maple Place and its attorney, Neal Quirk, were not answered.

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Since the eviction, Abreo has been living in a Decatur motel. He’s hoping to file suit against Habersham, whom he blames for Stormy’s injury. Stormy still is recovering and has some trouble breathing, he says.

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If the repairs to his apartment had been done, and if he was evicted after his court hearing, all of this could have been avoided, Abreo argues.

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“They just drove the knife in my back, twisted it, kept turning it,” he says. “Then they shot my dog.”

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mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com

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